It’s amazing, isn it?
Nowadays, you have video games that start out as just nothing more than a blueprint of a plan, that gets financial backing from the public, that’s right, public funding to get off the ground, and thanks to that same public funding, it usually, most of the time, has the money it needs to get off the ground raised or more than that, and becomes successful!
You see, public funding, or as it’s properly referred to: crowdfunding, is where the funding for a certain venture gets funded through contributions of money by the mass public, most times, this occurs over the Internet (most famous website for this arguably is Kickstarter). As of 2013, the crowdfunding business has escalated to being worth over $5.1 Billion around the world, money, money, money, what we MadSluggers wouldn’t do with $5.1 Billion…
There have been many things that have been funded by crowdfunding, such as theatre, documentaries, films and of course, most importantly, video games.
Here is a good example of how video gaming has done within crowdfunding, the highest reported funding by a crowdfunded project to date is ‘Star Citizen’, an online space trading and combat video game being developed by Chris Roberts and a video game company called Cloud Imperium Games, since the 24th of January of 2015, through ‘Star Citizen’, Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games have apparently raised USD$70,000,000. THAT MUCH MONEY?!? You’d never believe it! And other video games, such as ‘Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues’, ‘Mighty No. 9’, Project Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, amongst many others!
So as you can see, crowdfunding is a very lucrative business, and video games is one of the biggest funded things in that same world, hmm, I can just hear Pink Floyd’s “Money” playing in my head right now…